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l, to be so often part of the sky, and to shroud without obscuring the empty distances of our seas. There was a hard clear light to the north; and even over the Downs, low as they were upon the horizon, there was a sharp belt of blue. I saw the sun strike the white walls of Lady Newburgh's Folly, and I saw, what had hitherto been all confused, the long line of the Arundel Woods contrasting with the plain. Then the boom went over to port, the jib filled, I felt the helm pulling steadily for the first time in so many hours, and the boat responded. The wind was on me; and though it was from the north, that wind was warm, for it came from the sheltered hills. Then, indeed, I quite forgot those first few moments, which had so little to do with the art of sailing, and which were perhaps unworthy of the full life that goes with the governing of sails and rudders. For one thing, I was no longer alone; a man is never alone with the wind--and the boat made three. There was work to be done in pressing against the tiller and in bringing her up to meet the seas, small though they were, for my boat was also small. Life came into everything; the Channel leapt and (because the wind was across the tide) the little waves broke in small white tips: in their movement and my own, in the dance of the boat and the noise of the shrouds, in the curtsy of the long sprit that caught the ridges of foam and lifted them in spray, even in the free streaming of that loose untidy end of line which played in the air from the leach, as young things play from wantonness, in the rush of the water, just up to and sometimes through the lee scuppers, and in the humming tautness of the sheet, in everything about me there was exuberance and joy. The sun upon the twenty million faces of the waves made, music rather than laughter, and the energy which this first warmth of the year had spread all over the Channel and shore, while it made life one, seemed also to make it innumerable. We were now not only three, the wind and my boat and I; we were all part (and masters for the moment) of a great throng. I knew them all by their names, which I had learnt a long time ago, and had sung of them in the North Sea. I have often written them down. I will not be ashamed to repeat them here, for good things never grow old. There was the Wave that brings good tidings, and the Wave that breaks on the shore, and the Wave of the island, and the Wave that helps, and the Wave that
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